Margaret Halsey Quotes

Every man, in his own opinion, forms an exception to the ordinary rules of morality.

Hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue.

Hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue.

Hypocrisy is not generally a social sin, but a virtue.

Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people whom we personally dislike.

We have, in fact, two kinds of morality side by side; one which we preach but do not practice, and another which we practice but seldom preach.

Indifference to Reality. All nationalists have the power of not seeing resemblances between similar sets of facts. A British Tory will defend self-determination in Europe and oppose it in India with no feeling of inconsistency. Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them, and there is almost no kind of outrage — torture, the use of hostages, forced labour, mass deportations, imprisonment without trial, forgery, assassination, the bombing of civilians — which does not change its moral colour when it is committed by ‘our’ side.

President Trump's critics call him an immoral lout. By strict moral standards, so are we all.

The most worthless of mankind are not afraid to condemn in others the same disorders which they allow in themselves; and can readily discover some nice difference in age, character, or station, to justify the partial distinction.

The more immoral we become in big ways, the more puritanical we become in little ways.

Moralism doesn't produce morality; it produces immorality.

Taking somebody's money without permission is stealing, unless you work for the IRS; then it's taxation. Killing people en masse is homicidal mania, unless you work for the Army; then it's National Defense. Spying on your neighbors is invasion of privacy, unless you work for the FBI; then it's National Security. Running a whorehouse makes you a pimp and poisoning people makes you a murderer, unless you work for the CIA; then it's counter-intelligence.

Hypocrisy is a fashionable vice, and all fashionable vices pass for virtue.

Where there is no religion, hypocrisy becomes good taste.

There are clues in the script... he will say "I think drugs are immoral"'... but the guy who says that kills, tortures, pimps and has whores working for him. There is this strange morality going on, which is rather like the Mafia.

I must affirm that it is just as wrong, or perhaps even more so, to use moral means to preserve immoral ends.

Why are we talking about this good and evil? They're just names for sides. We know that.

If one starts with an impersonal beginning, the answer to morals eventually turns out to be the assertion that there are no morals.

It must be a good thing to be good or ivrybody wudden't be pretendin' he was.

Whenever you find a man who says he does not believe in a real Right and Wrong, you will find the same man going back on this a moment later. He may break his promise to you, but if you try breaking one to him he will be complaining 'It's not fair' before you can say Jack Robinson.

That we occasionally violate our own stated moral code does not imply that we are insincere in espousing that code.

The denial of an objective moral law, based on the compulsion to deny the existence of God, results ultimately in the denial of evil iteself.

The ethics of sex is a thorny problem. Each of us is forced to grope for a solution he can live with - in the face of preposterous, unworkable, and evil code of so-called 'Morals.' Most of us know the code is wrong, almost everybody breaks it. But we pay Danegeld by feeling guilty and giving lip service. Willy-nilly, the code rides us, dead and stinking, an albatross around the neck.

I lay down the Position, That whatever a Conscience well directed allows us to do for the Advancement of Truth, an erroneous Conscience will warrant for advancing a suppos'd Truth.

Bourgeois morality is largely a system of making cheap virtues a cloak for expensive vices.